2015's Games of the Year?

[sclpls]

I think I'm the only person here that was down on this year! The way you feel about this year was how I felt about games in 2012, and each subsequent year has been a disappointment for me. I guess I should be ecstatic next year though since 2016 will have a 2012 retro vibe with Dishonored 2 and XCOM 2 coming out. With any luck maybe Brendon Chung will release a game too and it will be the new best year ever!

[aprettycooldude]

The Witness comes out early in the year, setting everyone's GOTY in stone out the gate, so that's cool! 2016 will be great on that note alone

[Griddlelol]

I guess mine would be:

 

1. Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain

2. Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate

3. Splatoon

4. Bloodborne

5. Mario Maker

 

There's a bunch of games I've not really played from 2015. I feel like I'd really enjoy Sunless Sea if I could sit down and play it for a while. The Witcher 3 is just the biggest pain in my side. I love it, but I can't play for more than an hour or two, because the combat infuriates me so much. It's just so goddamn bad. I wish there was an option to just turn all that shit off and make it a fantasy detective simulator.

[Dewar]

I think I'm the only person here that was down on this year! The way you feel about this year was how I felt about games in 2012, and each subsequent year has been a disappointment for me. I guess I should be ecstatic next year though since 2016 will have a 2012 retro vibe with Dishonored 2 and XCOM 2 coming out. With any luck maybe Brendon Chung will release a game too and it will be the new best year ever!

 

I feel down on this year's AAA releases at least. It feels like a lot ones I was looking forward to got delayed until next year or ended up somewhat disappointing. Really the only ones I played and enjoyed were Fallout 4 and Metal Gear. There's been a ton of good smaller games though. My GOTY list is pending me being at home to take a look at my spreadsheet. 

[Deadpan]

Gotta remind all y'all again that if you liked a game this year, maybe you'll also like to talk about it for this unreasonably large GOTY list I am hosting. I'd love to get as many people and as many games as possible on there, to counteract the boring canon of normative top ten lists.

[Bjorn]

I feel down on this year's AAA releases at least. It feels like a lot ones I was looking forward to got delayed until next year or ended up somewhat disappointing. Really the only ones I played and enjoyed were Fallout 4 and Metal Gear. There's been a ton of good smaller games though. My GOTY list is pending me being at home to take a look at my spreadsheet. 

 

I feel like this year continues the malaise I've been feeling about AAA in general for a few years.  I can't look at AAA games and declare them bad, per se, just the feeling like they aren't what I'm looking for. 

[Ninety-Three]

I feel like this year continues the malaise I've been feeling about AAA in general for a few years.  I can't look at AAA games and declare them bad, per se, just the feeling like they aren't what I'm looking for. 

 

Speaking of malaise, I think I've figured out the common element to this year's theme of "Ninety-Three hates everyone's GOTY". Pillars of Eternity, Witcher 3, Shadowrun: Hong Kong, Undertale, Life is Strange, all these games and more get GOTY praise for their writing, which bounced right off me. It's not that I'm uninterested in story and writing, Planescape and The Longest Journey are among my all-time favorites, and Sunless Sea is my GOTY this year, but it seems like modern game writing is going in a very character-focused direction that I just do not care about. And that's disappointing, because I have a feeling it's going to edge out my preferred plot-driven stories.

 

Am I imagining trends that aren't there, or has anyone else noticed an overall shift in the medium towards towards more character-driven writing?

[Erkki]

I feel like this year continues the malaise I've been feeling about AAA in general for a few years.  I can't look at AAA games and declare them bad, per se, just the feeling like they aren't what I'm looking for. 

I think AAA games tend to appeal (among other things) to the gamers' desire for a great time/$ ratio, including e.g. The Witcher 3, which I guess is the only AAA I played to any significant extent this year. Now, this actually goes directly against what I'm looking for, because I'm looking for a memorable experience I can get from just a few hours, and I don't care that much about the cost of every minute. If the whole experience takes more than a few hours, it really has to justify itself.

 

Am I imagining trends that aren't there, or has anyone else noticed an overall shift in the medium towards towards more character-driven writing?

Hmm... I guess, not that I've thought about it much. From my list, SOMA is a nice exception to that, I think, although I wouldn't say it's exactly opposite of character-driven.

 

As for games in general this year, I kind of agree that it was a slightly disappointing year. I'm hopeful for next year with The Witness, Firewatch, Tacoma, No Man's Sky, VR. But then again if those end up the only significant ones I'm going to play it may again seem like disappointingly thin year.

[Badfinger]

I think I'm the only person here that was down on this year! The way you feel about this year was how I felt about games in 2012, and each subsequent year has been a disappointment for me. I guess I should be ecstatic next year though since 2016 will have a 2012 retro vibe with Dishonored 2 and XCOM 2 coming out. With any luck maybe Brendon Chung will release a game too and it will be the new best year ever!

 

I don't think you are, I feel like I'm the outlier somehow which is crazy to me. I don't even feel that excited about many AAA games this year. I liked Fallout for a while, but I didn't play - Bloodborne, AC, MGS, Just Cause, Call of Duty, and my list of games I'm excited about from this year is still so long.

 

I felt extremely excited about a lot of games in 2012 as well. I'm definitely in the Dishonored & XCOM camp. 2016 should be fun as well!

[Dragonfliet]

Am I imagining trends that aren't there, or has anyone else noticed an overall shift in the medium towards towards more character-driven writing?

 

I have also noticed this. Except, my reaction is: THANK GOD. Video game writing has almost uniformly been excruciatingly bad, with a few notable exceptions of mediocre with an ultra-rare dab of: pretty good. In recent years, the move towards decent character based writing has been a soothing balm. I love cool things and neat twists, but not at the expense of good character writing.

 

That being said: people keep praising Her Story and I don't think it was a very good game. It was REALLY interesting and thoughtfully put together from a mechanic level, and the writing was solid (and acting was great), but...it's a story-based game in which the story is a twist that is clever, I suppose, but ultimately meaningless--it gives the story no weight, it merely satisfies a technical detail. 

[Valorian Endymion]

This year I had a very strong push toward jrpgs and VN, while I bounce back from some wrpgs (Pillars, Divinitity), which a few year ago I would not even think twice... while I allways liked jrpgs, I felt that this push much begin when I played Final Fantasy XIII.

 

Mine list would be:

 

1. Nobunaga´s Ambition
2. Tales of Zestiria
3. Final Fantasy Type 0 HD
4. Notch - Innocent Sinner: Eclipsed Luna
5. Legend of Heroes Trails in the Sky
6. The Witcher 3
7. Total War Attila
8. Guilty Gear Xrd - SIGN -
9. Higurashi when they Cry - Ch 1 and 2
10. Final Fantasy XIII

Not one the list, because they are my GOTY of 2013-2015:

 

• Europa Universalis IV
• Crusader Kings II

[Latrine]

My top ten:

 

1. Hearthstone (Blackrock Mountain, The Grand Tournament, League of Explorers)

2. Her Story

3. Crypt of the Necrodancer

4. Undertale

5. Rocket League

6. Heroes of the Storm

7. Ori and the Blind Forest

8. Shovel Knight

9. Evolve

10. Titan Souls

 

Dragonfliet: I agree that the underlying story in Her Story didn't hold up to my expectations, but I actually disagree that the game is fundamentally a story-based game and should be judged ultimately based on it. In fact for me the game is much more about the process of reconstructing what's in there from the limited resources you have and the fact that you have some entertaining melodramatic FMVs as rewards for figuring things out is just gravy. As a game it reminds me a lot of Gone Home in that way, but in a completely different format and genre. Gone Home was also criticized by some for its story, being too simple or straightforward, which is fair but again not what I found most enjoyable about the game. (As for how the story here fails, I'm not quite sure what you mean about the story being ultimately meaningless because of the twist.)

[clyde]

I'm going to list my games of the year piece-meal starting with:

Beeswing

steam   

itch.io

 

 

Jack Spinoza (a.k.a Jack King-Spooner) appears to have recorded his impressions of a community he lived in during formative years. The mechanics are pretty much just walking around in a top-down RPG, poking friendly NPCs for idiosyncratic thoughts and checking out how messy their duplex is. Beeswing feels perversely voyeuristic compared to any other game I've played and that's what I love about it. I'm getting Jack's summation of the people and places he was familiar with in this town and playing reveals as much of him as those of whom he paints pictures.

The music and art feel like experiments with whimsical technique rather than focusing on fidelity of representation (my kind of thing). I want more of these by more people. I love walking around people's apartments, finding out what they hang on their walls and what they've confessed to Jack or advised him of. The results of drawing from reference include a quality of detail that the imagination is not capable of and this may be the best example of the former I've seen in this medium.

[Henroid]

I just ran through the list of games I got this year that were actually released this year, and I have 10 of them exactly. This isn't including anything that's Early Access though. I'll probably do a write-up tomorrow about what is where on my list and why, as well as why I passed up on games that are on everyone's lists. As in, I passed up on buying / playing them. For now in some cases.

[Vulpes Absurda]

I didn't even check to see if any of the games on my list game out this year or not. I figure if I played it this year it counts.

[oscar]

I thought there was a flipping embarrassing amount of great games released this year. So many big huge games too, most of which I didn't play. My top few GOTY are probs:

Metal gear solid 5

Bloodborne

Witcher 3

I only ended up playing bloodborne last month after buying it not long after it was out. Couldn't get into it the first time despite loving dark souls, but something clicked this time and I absolutely loved it. Metal gear is fantastic, gameplay-wise the best one yet. So many systems upon systems that all add up to the most open stealthy game I've played. Witcher is my GOTY. It is so very good. So charming and well made and funny and sad and warm and scary. Just everything I wanted from a big fantasy game. Amazing!

[prettyunsmart]

I didn't think I'd have ten, but I totally do. In a sort of specific order but not really:

• Rocket League: The game I probably launched the most times this year. It fits perfectly with how I play games these days. I can sneak in a match or two as a break between the things I need to be doing without feeling too guilty about it.
• The Beginner's Guide: What can I say? I'm a sucker for introspective metafiction.
• Neon Struct: Die Augen der Welt: They made a Deus Ex-style game that feels like the original while removing all the clunky bits.
• Undertale: "You pet the dog. It was a good dog."
• Splatoon: It allowed me to feel like a kid...and a squid. Also, it was a shooter I could play online without hating humanity.
• Crypt of the Necrodancer: My Spelunk-a-like of the year. The soundtrack is the best, and when you get into the rhythm of the combat, it feels like you're dancing with skeletons.
• Contradiction: This man.
• Her Story: It was a great year for FMV mystery games that were great to play with another person (see Contradiction). Playing through Her Story with my wife was one of my favorite gaming experiences of the year, even if the story turned out to be a bit crap (or completely crap) at the end.
• The Witcher 3: How the hell did I finish this game? The fact that I actually stuck with a 60 hour video game when I barely finish any games these days is a feat in itself.
• Super Mario Maker: I made a Mario. It was neat.

Honorable Mentions

• Until Dawn: For being the best game I watched someone else play this year.
• Metal Gear Solid V: For being the game I have the most mixed feelings about.
• Read Only Memories: For being the game that would probably be pretty high on my list of favorite games of the year if I hadn't just started playing it yesterday.

[eot]

This thread made me realise that I've hardly played any games released this year, or very many games at all really.

 

Just Her Story and Bloodborne.

 

Bloodborne was good but it was still a slight disappointment for me, regressing in many ways compared to Dark Souls.

[undermind9]

This thread made me realise that I've hardly played any games released this year, or very many games at all really.

i think i played a lot of games - but in reality it seems to be mostly dota and isaac, lot of both

[Sno]

I'm very surprised to see a lot of people really down on how this year went for games.

If nothing else, the broad range of picks present in this thread seem to indicate that there were a whole lot of different kinds of games for a whole lot of different kinds of gamers.

[twmac]

Yeah, I thought that 2015 was a better year for games than 2014. I am positively ecstatic that the two consoles are now starting to bounce off of each other in an attempt to take the public's money and that it is now starting to generate insteresting content. I mean things like ARK and Elite Dangerous on a console would have been unthinkable 2 years ago.

 

Similarly Until Dawn was a surprise and I never thought I would have got as deeply into Gems of War as I did.

[thenexus6]

When I think about it I really didn't buy or play many new games this year...

 

Dying Light

Rocket League - free with PS plus

Halo 5

Fallout 4

 

Still need to get some of the "big" titles - Arkham City, Witcher 3, Rainbow Six Siege maybe some time..

 

To be honest i've been playing older games still mostly this year - Battlefield, Driveclub, Last of Us. Most of my gaming this year has been hop on a multiplayer game for a hour or so instead of some deep single player game.

[Gatazhk]

5. Fallout Shelter

4. Total War Attila: Age of Charlemagne

3. Talos Principle

2. Cities: Skylines

1. Witcher 3

[elvaq]

Splatoon

[dartmonkey]

I shall be playing most of the 2015 games in the 2017/18 season. Mario Maker was good though.

A Happy New Year to you most excellent people X